


Stories Full of Empty Bottles

by ateliertamsin



Series: Fragile Tales of Janice McCann [1]
Category: The Book Group (TV)
Genre: CW: Eating Disorders, CW: alcohol, Podfic, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Available, also reflective, cw: alcoholism, cw: ed, not entirely sad, sad story for a sad janice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:48:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22042822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ateliertamsin/pseuds/ateliertamsin
Summary: This poison feels soft and gentle on Janice’s lips. Soothing and cool, like berries and wind.It is freeing and captivating all at once. It is dark and red like blood.And it tastes like pinot noir.-Another contemplative Story about Janice McCann. This one a bit more specific to the elements of food.Text and Podfic.
Series: Fragile Tales of Janice McCann [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1586656
Kudos: 6





	Stories Full of Empty Bottles

**Stories Full of Empty Bottles**

* * *

_(or click[here](https://soundcloud.com/user-17473441/stories-full-of-empty-bottles) for mobile streaming)_

* * *

This poison feels soft and gentle on Janice’s lips. Soothing and cool, like berries and wind. 

It is freeing and captivating all at once. It is dark and red like blood. 

And it tastes like pinot noir.

She runs her hands through her hair. Soft, thick, though showing some signs of tangling as she marks them in her mind.

It doesn’t bother her. They don’t bother her. In fact, they don’t even bother to phone.

Her friends, that is. Her friends who want, desperately, to be rid of this book group. This book club, which was exclusive not for the members, but for their pain. Where the madness took place within four walls and among a host of furniture and food.

Comforts of which Janice refused to touch. Comforts which felt more like poison than any wine or vodka or tonic ever could. 

It is the sugar on desert that tear her stomach and nerves apart rather than the arsenic-laced intent of her wine.

She fights anxiously against her fraying nerves, but the ends come undone like the fibres of threads, unravelling as she tries to stitch her life back together.

She takes that seam ripper of a drink and allows it to tear apart her sanity and marriage. 

Or is it because Jackie played the hypocrite and the fool by taking shears, more blunt than the careless precision of Janice’s seam ripper, and cut along the dotted line?

The skipping, railroading chalk marks that were made of the timeline of their marriage. The good times marked solidly against the bolts of cloth, the bad time faint and light and non-existent as you got lost towards the end. Those moments of good and bad that alternated so irregularly that you wonder if the person who marked them was drunk.

It is made of those little engine that could moments. 

Where Jackie sheared through the tracks before Janice could even crest the hill.

Or maybe that was Janice who did that? Or was she never quite sure?

Without her glasses (Cateye frames, though mice may be more appropriate), everything was hazy. If she were wearing those glasses, she may have blamed it on fingerprints, but instead, it’s just her mind. 

A bottle lay at her feet, the physics of it preventing its shattering.

It’s that unstoppable force against the immovable object. 

The unstoppable force against the fragile, splintering Janice.

Or was she the force barrelling forward trying to change her life while that roadblock (train block) always stood ahead of her, cutting her to ribbons as she impacted.

What had she ever done to him? To them?

To...

She can’t help herself much. Can’t contain herself either. Or the thing that flooded over.

Or is she the container? Brimming with everything that... is not her? 

She thinks she is. As the glass empties into her, substituting what is left of her with what is consuming of everyone else.

She is silent as she screams, shattering the glass. At a reflection back, she realizes that the only fragments on the ground are hers. 


End file.
